This past week, the Wayward Herald came across a post in The Passive Voice about the closing of a number of Barnes & Noble bookstores across the U.S. The numbers quoted in the post, which comes from an article at Melville House titled The Wrong Goodbye of Barnes & Noble, are alarming: If you include…
The Wayward Herald remains convinced that the number of interesting blog posts on which to comment decreases substantially during National Novel Writing Month. Fortunately, that will soon end, and that is one thing for which the Wayward Herald is thankful this week. Dante looks back on Purgatory at the end of NaNoWriMo. The Wayward Herald is…
I have long been a fan of Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! as an excellent resource on storytelling, and plot in particular. This week, in preparation for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), author Bethany Myers posted an article titled Plot Like A Pro, a creative piece applying Snyder’s 15 elements of story structure to Harry…
On July 18, 2011, I wrote my first blog post on the debate between indie publishing and the traditional publishing model. One year later, the conversation continues. Just this week, Joe Konrath discussed how e-book sales between traditional and indie published authors are not a zero sum game. Meanwhile, successful indie author Lindsay Buroker asked, “Is it Harder Today…
As readers of this blog know, I am keenly interested in the debate about whether authors are better off self-publishing their novels or pursuing a literary agent and a traditional publishing deal. The good news for me, at least, is that the blogosphere is filled with arguments for both sides. Recently, the debate has become so…
Last month I wrote about my personal revision Odyssey as I embarked upon the sixth draft of my novel. (Yes, I’m a glutton for punishment!) Well, today I finished that sixth draft. The process took about a month (losing some time due to work commitments), but in the end, I reduced the novel’s length by another 3,000…
Amid the debate between traditional publishing and indie publishing, including all the concerns about the quality of self-published works, we are reminded again about one hard reality: bookstores as we know them are ceasing to exist. Yesterday’s article in the Detroit Free Press chronicled the death throes of one local Borders store. And with shelf-space for…
Whenever I post about the debate between traditional publishing and indie publishing, readers comment about their frustration over the morass of bad self-published books on the market. In short, they wonder if it’s worth the effort of sifting through all the garbage out there to find good self-published fiction. Some, like author Joe Konrath, believe readers…
Joe Konrath, a champion of the indie publishing movement, posted another great article titled “The End is Nigh,” about the potential demise of the traditional publishing model. Konrath continues to make compelling arguments about the fate of traditional publishing and what authors should do in the face of it. I’m a keenly interested observer in…
This has nothing to do with historical fiction (at least that set in the Middle Ages) or fantasy fiction of any type. But for all the aspiring writers out there, Kathryn Stockett, the author of the bestselling novel The Help, wrote an article about how she was rejected by 60 literary agents before finding one…
As I near the point where I must decide whether to try the traditional publishing route of query letters and agent pitches one more time or venture into the growing world of indie publishing, I am focused on the ongoing debate between these two sides — a debate that’s starting to look more like the…